The world of nuclear deterrence is not a destination but a new zone of competition. Can Iran really afford this?
As the United States and Iran sit down for another round of talks in Rome, Tehran is debating the future of its nuclear weapons program. That’s not surprising. Yet, the bomb won’t solve the Islamic Republic’s deterrence problem. It will put Iran in an arms race it cannot win, and it will give Iran an option at the top of the escalation ladder when its problems run all the way up and down it.
There are various positions in the Iranian nuclear conversation: outright weaponization, revision of Iranian nuclear doctrine, a repeal of the fatwa against nuclear weapons, enrichment to weapons grade, advanced weaponization research, or some combination of the above. All are intended to raise Iran’s level of deterrence.
There has been favorable discussion of Kenneth Waltz’s view that the spread of nuclear weapons in the Middle East could result in regional stability if an Iranian bomb countered Israel’s. Indeed, there is an obvious logic to Iran considering nuclear weapons. An operational nuclear program would make any adversary think twice before hitting Iran.
Most discussion of Iranian nuclear acquisition has centered on whether Iran can quickly build a weapon without triggering an Israeli or American strike. Yet, there’s not enough focus on the day after Iran gets a bomb. Iran would be taking its first step into the world of nuclear deterrence. That world is not a destination, but a new zone of competition. And this would diminish Iran’s benefits from weaponization, since Iran is not well-positioned for that competition.
All this is a simple product of the equation of deterrence. If you launch a nuke, you get nuked back. The Islamic Republic would be signing its own death warrant if it actually used nuclear weapons. Therefore, it must convince those it wishes to deter that it is irrational or that it values the matter at hand more than it fears death. Otherwise, the enemy can simply call Iran’s bluff, ignoring Iranian nuclear threats. It will be hard for Iran to convince the world that it is fully irrational or that it cares more about ideological issues more than its own survival.
Iran does have the advantage of being seen by some in its adversary states as irrational. It is a government founded on religious ideology, opening the door to claims that Iran might choose to die wiping out Israel and thus to earn a place in paradise. And the Islamic Republic has figures within its ruling elite who sound like they are both fanatical and a bit stupid—a great combination for signalling irrationality. There are also elements of Iranian foreign policy that are hard to justify in terms of purely national interests, the confrontation with Israel (a state with which it shares no borders) being a prime example. That implies a measure of irrationality.
Yet, a closer examination weakens the case for Iranian irrationalism. A state can have irrational goals (like wiping out Israel) that it pursues by rational means. Indeed, Iranian foreign policy is sometimes coolly calculated. Tehran offered a limited, telegraphed response to the U.S. killing of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) head Qassem Soleimani, cutting losses rather than risking war with a superpower. To save its own neck, the regime let Israel carve up its friend Hamas and its brother Hezbollah.
Those who ascribe strong religious motivations to Iranian policy might also wonder why it abandoned the Shia shrines in Syria and denied its fighters there a glorious Karbala-style martyrdom battle. Moreover, the Islamic Republic has spent twenty years carefully keeping its nuclear program below thresholds that would trigger strikes. Voices within the ruling elite express frustration with all these limited, rational responses.
Iran could try to appear more irrational, but giving more running room to the zanier Friday prayer leaders or replacing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei with someone less predictable can only get the country so far. Iran will still face many decisions, and the choices it makes will show a tendency. Tehran would need adversaries to see that tendency as irrational. Not just tougher, since toughness can be rational. Only irrationality will do. Yet taking irrational decision after irrational decision would put the regime in a bad position.
The other dimension of deterrence is thus a better candidate. Iran’s adversaries must believe that it would prefer death to backing down. This is hard to do, since there are always alternatives. Bashar al-Assad chose to flee Damascus last December rather than use his chemical weapons once again on the advancing opposition. In other words, he accepted the end of his regime. Iran has so far accepted many strategic blows rather than seriously escalating its confrontations with Israel and the United States.
And this is where the real art of deterrence begins. Nuclear-armed rivals build nuclear forces and develop doctrines designed to convince each other that they just might do it, even with the costs. This often creates a pressure to maintain deterrence by taking risks and building new weapons, which can fuel an arms race. Iran, with its many troubles, is not well-placed for arms races with its wealthier, more technologically advanced enemies.
Indeed, the real failure of Iranian deterrence has come from weaknesses throughout the escalation ladder—weaknesses that a bomb at the top of the ladder will not eliminate. Iran has had to pull punches by conducting strikes with unclear targeting and advanced notice because it knows that its conventional and covert capabilities all through the middle rungs are inferior to Israel’s.
Ballistic missiles are the Islamic Republic’s flagship capability, yet two waves of missile attacks on Israel directly killed only one person—a Palestinian. These were weak Iranian answers to strong Israeli blows. The Israelis answered Iran’s missiles with quiet, precise actions that knocked back key Iranian capabilities. Iranian leaders said they would respond. Months later, they haven’t. That’s all in the upper-middle section of the escalation ladder, and Israel came out on top.
A nuclear bomb would make Iran a scarier country against which to wage full-scale war. That would give Iran better deterrence around the top of the escalation ladder and against the most expansive enemy war goals (regime change above all). Yet the ability to blast a few Israeli cities or American Gulf bases at the price of Iran’s destruction is less scary if the Islamic Republic’s enemies have more modest goals. Mutual destruction is an empty threat against an enemy going after Iran one salami slice at a time.
Worse for Iran, having nuclear weapons doesn’t mean they can use them. Even if Iran builds a deliverable nuclear weapon, Iran’s enemies might prevent delivery. Israel and the United States have demonstrated their ability to intercept a large share of incoming Iranian missiles. Israel has also had a string of covert action coups against Iran’s nuclear program. Could they sabotage Iran’s missiles or identify nuclear launch sites for preemptive strikes? Iran also has seen how U.S. wars often begin with an effort to break the enemy’s command and control abilities. If commanders can’t reach the launchers with a launch order, deterrence fails.
Some of these problems are more or less unsolvable. The Islamic Republic is infested with spies because it is corrupt, unpopular, and economically weak. The United States and Israel will remain technologically superior to Iran.
Yet Iran’s leaders will be tempted to try to solve or offset all of the problems. Each solution is unappealing.
Iran can try to offset the covert action and command and control problems with greater secrecy within the nuclear apparatus. The fewer people know where the bomb is, the fewer ways enemy intelligence can find it. Iran can also delegate nuclear launch authority to lower levels of its system. Both of these are risky, since they increase the chances of losing a nuclear weapon or getting into a nuclear war by accident.
Iran can also try to build missiles that bypass Israeli and American missile defenses. This is already happening, since Iran wants to make sure its conventional missiles can find their targets. But a nuclear mission would intensify that quest and involve Iran in a risky and expensive arms race with two much more advanced countries.
Let’s start with the basics. Iran would have a small number of nuclear weapons, especially in the initial years of its weapons program. It would need some of that small number to get through. It could try to mix its nuclear missiles into a massive conventional strike, thus overwhelming defenses. But it would have to wonder if Israel or America could filter the incoming projectiles to avoid wasting effort on conventional missiles.
If, for example, Israel’s highly effective intelligence apparatus identified which missile bases hosted the nuclear warheads, it could ignore missiles coming from other bases. It is also possible that Israel and the United States could look at the radar returns and identify projectiles launched from the right missile bases but do not match with the right missile systems (If such a capability exists, it would be highly secret; if it doesn’t, advances in artificial intelligence could bring it into existence soon).
Further, an enemy that can find Iran’s missile bases can target Iran’s missile bases, striking first to reduce the number of missiles that get off the ground. Any nuclear-armed enemy would face incentives to use nuclear weapons for the task, since a bigger blast does the job better. They would also need to have those nukes on a hair trigger, ready to go the moment nuclear war looks likely. Iran, in turn, would need to be on high alert to deter such a strike. Given the immense capabilities of Israel and especially the United States, Iran would even need to worry that conventional strikes could take out its nuclear weapons. All of this would raise the risk of inadvertent nuclear war.
These pressures are familiar to nuclear-armed states that face capable foes. And such states have responded by improving missiles and altering alert postures. They’ve also expanded their arsenals, built massive detection systems to watch for enemy first strikes, established command and control systems to enable rapid counterattacks, hardened launch sites, dispersed launchers, and more.
These arms races can take on a logic of their own, since the enemy gets a vote. They watch one’s nuclear plans develop, and build counters of their own. One must then counter the counters, which are countered in turn, and so on. All this quickly becomes very expensive. That expense sucks resources out of the national economy, of course, but it also competes with other forms of military power. Would Iran gut the rest of its military to pay for nuclear forces?
Worse still, developmental nuclear systems don’t always pan out.
Witness the case of the United Kingdom, which has experienced several major failures in its nuclear weapons program. As a great power in a world of superpowers, it has had to concentrate on just a few lines of effort. It threw its weight behind the U.S. Skybolt air-launched ballistic missile program. Skybolt would let bombers deliver nuclear weapons from well beyond enemy air defenses, reducing British worries that their bombers could not get through. The Skybolt program ran into trouble, and the United States had alternatives coming, so it cancelled the missile.
This threw UK defense plans into a crisis and left London with a less-credible deterrent until they could bring new Polaris missiles into service. A decade later, upgrades to Soviet defenses led the British to doubt that Polaris was still enough. They considered replacing Polaris, but ultimately tried to improve it with a complex decoy system codenamed Chevaline. That program succeeded, but at a far greater price than planned. This is the kind of costly arms racing a nuclear weapon would get Iran.
There’s another layer of relevance for Iran in the UK case. Britain had U.S. assistance in its nuclear weapons program, and had its own national research capacity. Iran might hope for similar benefits from Russia, which is offering unknown favors in return for help crushing Ukraine. Britain’s relationship with the United States is much tighter than Iran’s with Russia, but the U.S.-UK nuclear weapons relationship had plenty of troubles. Beyond Skybolt, U.S.-UK nuclear cooperation went through ups and downs. That 1950s Britain was riddled with Soviet spies discouraged U.S. cooperation. (Iran, riddled with Israeli spies, may face the same problem.)
The British also faced a constant dilemma between the benefits of cooperating with the Americans and the risks of depending on them. Lean too much on the patron and one risks being left in the lurch again with a nuclear establishment atrophied by disuse. The Russia-Iran relationship is far looser than the U.S.-UK relationship. Close nuclear cooperation might not be in the cards. Even if it is, Russia might trade that card to America for concessions that matter more to Moscow.
The nuclear options Iran is considering now are only a first step down the arms-race path. A crude, non-deliverable test bomb would reduce Iranian deterrence. By placing itself outside the Non-Proliferation Treaty and demonstrating itself to be a nuclear power, the international political price of using a nuclear weapon against Iran would go down. The United States has long refused to rule out using a nuclear weapon against even non-nuclear states. This implies a greater level of U.S. sympathy if nuclear weapons struck a nuclear Iran. It certainly wouldn’t shatter the relationship, especially under a Republican administration with weak ties to the old foreign policy establishment’s nuclear norms.
A conventional attack would also be more likely if Iran develops a crude, non-deliverable bomb. The international environment would never be more permissive for an Israeli strike than at that moment. Many Western and regional players would be quietly grateful if Israel took down a weaponizing Iranian nuclear program. And the Israelis have been willing to take significant, unilateral steps to stop nuclear proliferation before. They hit Syria’s Deir Ez-Zor reactor in 2007 and Iraq’s Osirak in 1981. A crude bomb, being unusable against Israel, would not deter Israel, even as it lowers the consequences to Israel of an attack.
Iran would thus be wise to stop its ears to the nuclear siren song. Acquiring nuclear weapons would bring Iran into an arms race without solving its main deterrence problems. A nuclear-armed Iran wouldn’t just be bad for the world—it would be bad for Iran.
About the Author:
John Allen Gay is executive director of the John Quincy Adams Society, a national network of student groups centered on a vision of foreign policy restraint. He is a former managing editor of the National Interest, where his writing focused on U.S. foreign policy and the Middle East. Follow him on X: @JohnAllenGay.
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